I’ve been having a bit of trouble getting Webrick running properly on Ubuntu and Windows; and the resolution… ??? I don’t know, but the suggestions are to try Mongrel, which though a solution is a bit annoying as Webrick is there ready to go…
Installing Mongrel on Windows 7 was rather easy though; it involved
gem install mongrel
Then just navigating to the directory with the rails application in it and typing:
mongrel_rails start
CTRL-C stops the process.
The instructions here for installing the win32-service didn’t work, but this did help… So i ran the following command:
gem install win32-service –platform x86-mswin32
… and it installed. Now we need to install mongrel_service
gem install mongrel_service
… which fails… and i still need to resolve this 
